The QCD phase diagram is studied in the presence of an isospin asymmetry using continuum extrapolated staggered quarks with physical masses. In particular, we investigate the phase boundary between the normal and the pion condensation phases and the chiral/deconfinement transition. The simulations are performed with a small explicit breaking parameter in order to avoid the accumulation of zero modes and thereby stabilize the algorithm. The limit of vanishing explicit breaking is obtained by means of an extrapolation, which is facilitated by a novel improvement program employing the singular value representation of the Dirac operator. Our findings indicate that no pion condensation takes place above T ≈ 160 MeV and also suggest that the deconfinement crossover continuously connects to the BEC-BCS crossover at high isospin asymmetries. The results may be directly compared to effective theories and model approaches to QCD.

We investigate the viability of a new type of compact star whose main constituent is a Bose-Einstein condensate of charged pions. Several different setups are considered, where a gas of charged leptons and neutrinos is also present. The pionic equation of state is obtained from lattice QCD simulations in the presence of an isospin chemical potential and requires no modeling of the nuclear force. The gravitationally bound configurations of these systems are found by solving the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations. We discuss weak decays within the pion condensed phase and elaborate on the generation mechanism of such objects.

Abstract. We investigate the properties of QCD at finite isospin chemical potential at zero and non-zero temperatures. This theory is not affected by the sign problem and can be simulated using Monte-Carlo techniques. With increasing isospin chemical potential and temperatures below the deconfinement transition the system changes into a phase where charged pions condense, accompanied by an accumulation of low modes of the Dirac operator. The simulations are enabled by the introduction of a pionic source into the action, acting as an infrared regulator for the theory, and physical results are obtained by removing the regulator via an extrapolation. We present an update of our study concerning the associated phase diagram using 2+1 flavours of staggered fermions with physical quark masses and the comparison to Taylor expansion. We also present first results for our determination of the equation of state at finite isospin chemical potential and give an example for a cosmological application. The results can also be used to gain information about QCD at small baryon chemical potentials using reweighting with respect to the pionic source parameter and the chemical potential and we present first steps in this direction.

We study the phase diagram and the thermodynamic properties of QCD at nonzero isospin asymmetry at physical quark masses with staggered quarks. In particular, continuum results for the phase boundary between the normal and the pion condensation phases and the chiral/deconfinement transition are presented. Our findings indicate that the pion condensation phase is restricted to T 170 MeV for isospin chemical potentials up to 325 MeV. We also use the data to test the range of validity of the Taylor expansion method and show first results for the equation of state.

We present our latest results on the application of the complex Langevin method to one-and twodimensional QCD. Although the method is stable, it unfortunately converges to an incorrect result when applied as such. After applying additional gauge cooling steps, the results agree with the known analytical results in the one-dimensional case. However, in the two-dimensional case the disagreement subsists, even with gauge cooling, when the sign problem is sufficiently large.